


Ghost

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 02:02:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/999551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco is released from prison and flees to France. Hermione, seeking to heal her own scars, follows him there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost

**1**

The morning I am released from prison, the sun is white and blinding, and I wait on the wet cliffs at the base of the tower as the wind blows saltwater against my skin. The warden has returned the clothes I wore seven years ago when I was admitted, but they now hang over my body like a shroud, and my wand feels alien and stiff between my fingers. I am blinking under the weight of the open sky. I feel as though I am a skeleton, bones rattling in the cold.

A boat drifts out of the mist, and Granger steps onto the flat rocks closest to the sea, the ends of her black robes swirling in the waves. How fitting, that she would be the one to usher me back into a life that has left me behind. She throws back her hood, her hair curling in the damp, and meets my dull eyes with a hollow sort of brusqueness. Perhaps she is annoyed by my pace as I creak down the wet stone toward her—or perhaps I have been isolated for so long now that human expressions have become illegible to me.

“I’m sorry about your parents,” she says, the first words I have heard in years. That ache is still raw, so I pretend she has not spoken at all, and she continues in a smooth tone that I am sure she believes is calming. “You’ll notice the world has changed somewhat.”

I open my mouth to speak, but all that comes out is a harsh cough and a pain that tears through my throat like a thousand needles. I have remained silent for too long. My hands are white and shaking, the veins blue through my translucent skin. As she reaches out to steady the boat, the sleeve of her robe draws back—her skin is golden and dark from the sun but for a faint white line of scars along the inside of her forearm, once a word but now just a memory of shrieks in a dungeon.

“Get into the boat, please,” she says, and she watches as I stagger over the edge and collapse against the stern.

The smell of wet wood rushes through me as blackness swirls across my vision, the world fading to a sick neon yellow. Something like the taste of blood pulses in my mouth, and she stands at the opposite end of the boat and watches me sway against the edge, trying to hold on to something. I press my hand over my chest and gasp at the dry pain from the base of my ribs. The sun seems too hot against my skin, and I feel the prickle of sweat along the back of my neck.

“Your body is adjusting to the absence of wards,” she explains, though her voice sounds muffled and distant against the roar of the ocean. “You will be stunned for the journey. Once we dock, you will be released from custody, and your magic will have returned sufficiently to ensure operation of your wand. You will be expected to adhere to the conditions of your parole and to report to me annually at the Ministry for criminal and psychiatric evaluation. Do you understand?”

She waits silently, and I watch the water swirl white below me, the cliffs dark and shining in the sunlight. I finally nod, my shoulders slumping against the wood of the stern, and this is the last thing I remember before blackness descends.

.

The manor was confiscated along with all of my family’s property, so I spend my first few months of freedom in a Muggle shelter in London. They assume I am a veteran of some foreign war because of the way I shake and mutter in my sleep, and I never bother to tell them otherwise. I have spoken hardly more than I did in prison, and I wonder whether the quality of my voice has changed permanently, having become some hoarse thing that even my mother wouldn’t have recognised. I keep to myself and wander the streets, and sometimes I think about the way I once would have shuddered at this—though I have very few emotions left with which to shudder now. My face is gaunt and hollow, and I am twenty-five but feel infinitely older than that.

The effects of the dark magic still lingering around Azkaban began slowly. It started off as a numbness in my fingers, drifting inside me until it was too late to stop it, a nothingness where all my emotions should have been. The prisoners are kept docile and depressed, and this was why, when I received a note informing me that my parents had been killed in the first of the French riots, I simply folded it back up and stared out the high window of my cell into the white sky, searching for a reaction the same way you try to remember a dream after waking up. Some have fought it and escaped over the years, but I suppose I have always been a weak person.

After my release, I once tried to summon up the grief that had evaded me for so long. Sitting on a park bench, my hands pressed over the hollows of my eyes, I thought about the smell of my mother’s perfume, but it felt as though it were someone else’s memory: distant, silent, faded. The trees rustled in the wind overhead, and the coming of autumn echoed in the smell of cigarette smoke and wet leaves.

That was how I met her. There on the park bench, the sleeve of her jumper brushed against the bare skin of my neck, and I realised that someone was patting me on the back in the same way that a mother comforts a crying child. She took in the shadows under my eyes and the bones that still stood out at my collar, and what began with us as a moment on a park bench devolved into months spent tangled in the sheets of her bed.

Cosette is the perfect answer to a question I never knew I had been asking, and she says nothing when I wander out of her flat in the middle of the night to walk the streets and drown myself in the silence of the city. When she tells me she loves me, she expects no reply and I never give one. She is younger than I am and naive about the world, and though part of me wants to shake her and ask her why she is letting a strange man live in her home and use her body to heal himself, a greater part of me starves to be loved in a way that I could never hope to return.

.

The day of my annual parole evaluation is the first day I use magic since being released. Granger sits across from me at her desk and watches as I whisper the words _Priori incantatem,_ and when she waits and waits and nothing happens, blood rushes to her cheeks in a way that would almost be pretty if it weren’t for the stern line of her mouth and the way her quill stiffens in her fingers. Sunlight streams in on us through the windows, illuminating the dust motes that flicker through the air as she exhales.

She asks me a list of questions meant to determine my mental stability, jotting down my answers in sharp cursive. On the ring finger of her left hand, there is a band of skin a shade lighter than the rest—I notice this with the same disinterest that I notice most things now. Once during our session, her other hand flits over that space and pauses there, lingering in the empty air.

She meets my eyes and speaks in the same clinical tone she always uses to address me. “I suppose you’ve heard about the current situation in France,” she says.

“No,” I reply. This is the truth, and though I expect to feel nothing even though the question was clearly meant to provoke me, the memory of my mother’s perfume, a memory I thought I had lost forever, slowly clouds my throat and forces me forward. My pulse surges and I clamp my hand over my mouth.

“Are you—?” she starts before shoving a rubbish bin toward me and jerking away from her desk as I retch. “Christ,” she says.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, asking that?” I snap, running the back of my hand over my mouth. I feel as though a dam has been broken and everything I have been holding back for the past eight years has come flooding up. Something hot slithers down my cheek, and I realise I am crying.

An emotion like disgust or pity flashes across her eyes, and the corner of her mouth is curled down, exposing the white flash of her teeth as she whirls on me. “You deserve this,” she says, her voice suddenly breathy and high. “You deserve whatever guilt you get to live with. Do you wish you had escaped, too, so you could have died in—”

The palms of my hands sting where I slam them down against her desk as I stand, and her voice cuts off in her throat. Though I intended to scream at her or strangle her, an unintelligible roar swirling inside me as though it might burst out at any minute, the silence stretches between us, and my shoulders slowly slump so that I stand wilted before her like some pale, dead thing.

“Well, you couldn’t escape, could you?” she finally says, her hands shaking in front of her. “Now get out of my office.”

She is a blur of golden brown in the corner of my vision as I turn away. Where once there was nothing inside me, there is now a storm that rages like the waves that would beat against the cliffs at the foot of the tower outside my cell. My magic surges, and I find myself Apparating to the edge of what used to be the manor, the place where it overlooks the ocean. In the distance, I hear the wail of a charm being set off, and the tiny black figures of Aurors appear on the horizon behind me. Out across the sea lies the place my father escaped to after having been imprisoned for five years, the place where he took my mother to die.

Below, the water is calm and smooth as a windowpane. Someone shouts from far behind me, and a spell whirrs just past the side of my face in a jet of pale red light. I close my eyes and feel the wind rushing along my skin, the hundreds of meters of empty air that lie below me. There will be several witnesses, and I clench my wand as I step out over the edge. Granger was right: I was too weak back then, huddled like an animal in the corner of my cell, waiting to see the light of day. But there are always ways to escape.

**2**

When the report of his death first lands on my desk, I feel as though someone is playing a sick joke on me. I do not believe it, and I feel a strange sort of tension winding up through my spine before my throat burns and my eyes begin to sting. I never told Harry this, but I saw Malfoy once in the streets of London, wandering like a ghost. His hair was almost white against the overcast sky, and the lack of expression on his face haunted me for days. That morning in my office, watching him break down, I was both ashamed for him and fascinated by him.

I tell myself it does not matter either way, though I thrash in bed at night at the thought of him walking free, because how will I have my justice then? Even if everything else in my life is falling apart, I have always had this, the knowledge that he and others like him will have to face the consequences of what they did during the war. This is the secret I have kept in the quietest corners of my heart, the places I was never able to show Ron and will never have the chance to show him now. This is it, my greatest secret: the desire for revenge still flickers inside me like a cooling ember just waiting to burst into flame.

The Malfoy file still gathers dust on my shelf, though it has been months since his suicide. I expect to feel something when I catch a glimpse of it through the corner of my eye: an echo of frustration or hatred. Instead I feel nothing, and I tell myself this means I have moved on, though I know it really means I still do not believe he is dead. There are too many suspicious coincidences about it, and the truth is that he fought too hard to die so quietly. I remember when we first brought him in eight years ago, he wrestled and snarled like a caged beast in custody, firing off hex after hex, one of which sliced cleanly through the muscle of my thigh and left a long, ugly scar.

The truth is that I want closure to everything and that death would be too simple an end, like the simple end of love. I suppose I will just have to wear these scars like I wear the rest, pale reminders of the paths my life has taken.

.

Harry sits illuminated by the sunlight that drifts through the dusty windows of my new flat. There are boxes to unpack and insurance forms to settle, and there are photographs that need to be removed from their frames before I can truly begin to call this place home. The light mark where my wedding ring used to lie has faded now and is only barely visible, only if I look for it, and my fingers still settle there in moments of nervous stress, though this is a habit I am trying to break.

“The offer still stands, you know, with the international team,” Harry is saying between sips of coffee. His eyes are startlingly green in the light of morning, and he relaxes against my counter just as a cat stretches out after a nap, both lazy and wary at once.

“No, it’s not that simple.”

“Why not? I don’t mean to be insensitive, but there’s nothing keeping you here. Maybe a change is what you need.”

I sigh, hands paused in prying open a box. At the top lies a photograph of Ron and I on our wedding day—I am smiling at the camera, my bouquet of flowers rustling in the breeze, and he is looping his arm around my waist and smiling only at me. I suppose I will put it away in a closet and never look at it again. Over my shoulder, Harry rustles as he straightens up and comes to join me.

“You could be out in the field again,” he says quietly. “It’s been almost a year, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I whisper. I intended my voice to be stronger. “Almost a year.”

“I thought you wanted to return to active duty,” he says, though it comes out as a question. Harry was always better with this than Ron was, getting to the heart of the matter before I have time to dwell on everything else.

It was such a simple thing, such a routine mission, apprehending a ring of smugglers. I was glowing and happy, everything in my life full of potential, like a garden blooming in the spring. It was dark in the alleyway, so silent that when the curse hit him and I smelled the sudden tang of blood in the cold night, I thought we had stumbled onto an injured vagrant or something like that. I remember my hands coming away from him stained red, and it was painless and sudden how quickly sleep rushed in on me after that. When I woke up later, I was alive but part of me was alive no longer, and that was the end of our story.

“All right,” I tell Harry, my fingers fluttering over the edge of the frame, just brushing the tops of our heads in the photograph. “Maybe a change is what I need, after all.”

.

Paris is stifling in the summer, especially in the room of the rented flat that Harry and I share. In the street four storeys below us lies the entrance to the magical arrondissement, disguised in the abandoned blue storefront of a masonry shop. We are part of the surveillance team that watches the comings and goings through that doorway, and I spend most of my evenings perched on our balcony, pretending to read the same ten pages of a book as I watch the passersby on the street. There have been increasing murmurs of revolutionary activity here since the riots were quelled three years ago, and we have been called in by the French Ministry to assist in keeping order.

I look up as Harry bustles in through the door behind me, a paper bag cradled in one arm and a baguette slung under the other. His cheeks are flushed with colour, and he flings the groceries down on the counter before removing his glasses and splashing water from the kitchen sink over his face.

“I never thought I would miss London summers,” he says as he pats his face dry with his shirtsleeve and hovers in the doorway of the tiny balcony, where the breeze is almost nonexistent. The coming night hangs heavy and humid over the street, and I fold my book closed in my lap.

“No one has come through in the past hour or so,” I tell him.

“Yeah, because it’s too fucking hot to go outside,” he mutters. I breathe out a laugh, and he slides back into the kitchen. “I’ll make some dinner. You hungry?”

“Mm, did you pick up those rolls from that place down the street?” I call over my shoulder.

His head pops into the doorway of the balcony and he tosses one to me, and I close my eyes as I take a bite and listen to the sounds of domestic life: a knife on a cutting board, plates being slid out from a cupboard. I wonder whether Ginny and Harry will ever get married and move beyond this stage of permanent bachelorhood that she has imposed upon him, though they both turned out to be freer spirits than I ever imagined them to be. Whenever I ask Harry about it, he just shrugs and says they’ll get there when they get there.

The first stars are coming out overhead, barely visible against the lights of the city. Perhaps tonight will break the heat wave that has had us cooped up indoors for so long. As I open my book again, it happens so quickly that I almost miss it: two men Apparate into the street below me, and I catch the briefest flicker of white blond like sunlight off snow before they slip through the abandoned storefront. Then they are gone, and I am standing with my hands braced on the rusted rail of the balcony. My breath comes too quickly, my pulse racing in the hollow of my throat, and I feel Harry approach behind me.

“It was nothing,” I hear myself saying. “Nothing. I thought I saw something, that was all.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, his fingers heavy over the blade of my shoulder. The street below is quiet, and I find myself wondering whether I even saw him. Perhaps I am becoming obsessed by my work, by avenging old wrongs that were never put right.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I tell him, sinking back into my chair, and I let my words filter through me until I believe them myself.

**3**

Some mornings I wake up with the taste of saltwater still lingering in my throat. There was a strange sort of freedom in the fall, and I was not entirely sure I would make it until I felt the spell take hold as I hit the water, cushioning my landing into the cold depths below the cliff. Inhaling deeply through my charmed gills, I swam until the light of the sun was nothing more than a blue echo from above and the silence of the sea pressed in on me in the darkness.

It is an eerie thing, crafting a dead body. I scraped my wrist on the rocks until it bled, flowing into the sand on the seafloor, which I gathered and sifted through my hands, weaving layers and layers of magic into it until I was faced with a pale replica of myself hovering in the water before me. As I Apparated away, I imagined it floating in to shore and taking its first and last breath of salty life before collapsing, its open eyes reflecting the endless white of the sky. I realised I would never see Cosette again, and I was surprised by the empty sadness I felt at that realisation.

All in all, faking your own death is not as easy as some people make it sound—though yes, these sorts of things are common in Malfoy family history. My parents kept a flat in Paris, which was where I suppose they spent their last few weeks together. It was dusty and untouched when I whirled into being in the foyer, my clothes still drenched. Though the electricity had been cut off long before, and the water was running cold in the taps, their belongings were still placed neatly in their spots in closets and on shelves.

My father was always a secretive man, and there was one thing no one outside of the Malfoy family knew: he had been prepared to leave England while the Dark Lord was still in power, taking us and fleeing to France, where he had purchased a flat using the name Madeleine. The end of the war changed all that, and both my father and I were imprisoned—though only I served out my full sentence. He managed to escape just as he managed to escape all things, and he and my mother were somehow caught in the crossfire during the first few weeks of chaos three years ago, when France was in the grip of its own struggle with dark magic.

The political atmosphere has calmed somewhat now, though the French Ministry is in control in name only, the strings being pulled by a group of dark sorcerers who lurk in the magical arrondissement. I know this because I have, simply put, fallen in with a bad crowd. I do not mean this in the way that someone like Granger would take it, because I am no longer interested in dark magic and was hoping to remain uninvolved in the situation. Instead I mean that I have somehow become part of a group of idealistic young people who hope to overthrow the Ministry and bring about some sort of lasting peace.

It happened so slowly that I was not sure this was the case until it was too late for me to back away. The group is led by a revolutionary called Apollo, though that is not his real name, and I suppose he recognised a desperate man when he saw one. He moves like a supernova of colour, his hair honey blond and his eyes the colour of the sea, and our conversations often devolve into the sort of fervour I thought I had left behind in my schoolboy days.

“You understand, Madeleine,” he said to me one evening as we sat huddled in the smoky corner of the tavern. He does not drink and neither do I, really, so I think the group gathers here because something about the atmosphere seems conducive to revolutionary activity. “Our parents came from a great generation, and perhaps our generation will be greater still, but I hope our own children will never have to be great.”

“Yes, I understand,” I reply, though I know that my father was a coward and I am a coward, too.

.

I awake at dusk one evening to the sharp crack of Apparition in my foyer, and I stagger out of bed to find Apollo standing there amidst the sheet-covered furniture. I have taken to sleeping during the days because the streets are too flooded with people and the heat makes everything exhausting, so I blink and watch him. His face is flushed and his teeth glint white in the semidarkness, and he reaches toward me as though I have something he expects me to hand over.

“Madeleine, get dressed at once,” he says. “We have a meeting with the leader of the Paris cell.”

My time in prison has made me more compliant than I once was, and I have learned not to question Apollo when he imparts these sorts of revelations. He has been hinting at having infiltrated the dark cell for weeks, and though part of me screams to turn him down, a greater part is drawn to him the same way a moth is drawn to a flame. Apollo glances out toward the street as I pull on a shirt and wash my face with cold water, and then we are Apparating to an empty suburb and stepping through the blue storefront that leads to the magical arrondissement.

The streets are growing dark, and the gas lamps that come on overhead reflect our blurred images in the empty windows of shops as we pass. I have memories of this place from childhood, my mother’s hand cool and warm around my own as I skipped from shop to shop, but the arrondissement has grown derelict within the past few years, the cobblestones uneven and the white buildings stained black from rainwater. Beside me, Apollo seems to hum with nervous tension, his steps quick and purposed. “I told them I was bringing a recruit,” he says, offering no more explanation than that.

When we reach the place, something like wariness settles over my shoulders. We ascend a narrow staircase lined with cobwebs, a single candle flickering at the top, and reach a door emblazoned with lines of dark runes, verses that have been burned into the wood of the door itself. The sick memory of dark magic wavers inside me, and I find myself breathing with my hand clasped over my chest. The stairway is narrow the same way a cell is narrow, with the same lack of light, the same thrum of magic.

“Madeleine,” Apollo hisses beside me.

“It’s fine,” I gasp out, wringing my fingers together and shaking off the tension. “Just a moment. It’s fine.”

The door swings open to reveal a woman who reminds me of my aunt, in some ways. She is beautiful but startlingly unkempt, her eyes dark and flashing as she leads us through to the back room, where a hooded man sits before a stained glass window. The whole scene is startlingly domestic, and I realise that we are in what used to be a hotel. I may have even stayed here once as a child, though I do not remember it now. The wallpaper is peeling and the wood slats on the floor have been warped, side effects of the dark magic practised within these walls.

I feel it almost immediately, an insistent burning in my forearm, and I have to fight to keep myself from crying out. The scene before my eyes wavers, and I realise my mistake now, to think I could outrun my past—to think that I could serve my time and make a new life for myself in this world. The man in the chair rises and approaches us, and I recognise him from meetings in my father’s study so many years ago, though his name escapes me. Now he is here, scrabbling for power on the continent.

“I see you brought me a new recruit,” he says. I feel Apollo’s hand tightening on my arm as though he senses I am about to run, and things happen very quickly after that. I wrestle free of his grip and try to make a break for the doorway, but the woman shrieks and a spell stuns me from behind and has me thudding down, my teeth piercing my tongue as I land. My mouth floods with the taste of iron, and I cough it up in spurts onto the wooden floor. Someone is shouting behind me, and a cold rush of air passes over my back as Apollo hurtles through the open doorway and out of sight down the stairs. I find myself hoping he will escape, as I will almost certainly meet my end here.

The man hovers over me, a dark shadow across the floor, and hauls me to my feet. The steady drip of blood from my lips to my shirtfront seems to disgust him, but his mouth curls and he spits out the words I had hoped never to hear again: “The Malfoy son?” He turns toward his wife, who is huddling near the window. Perhaps he expected her to laugh with him, but she only seems scared or cautious. In the street outside, I hear raised voices and wonder whether Apollo has been captured. “Your father would kill you himself if he could see you now. What sort of deal did you make to earn your freedom?”

“You’re mistaken,” I say before thinking better of it. “The Malfoy son is dead.” I feel my old smirk making its way to my lips and wonder whether this is how they will find my body, but a sharp crack rends the air and leaves me falling again as a jet of red light shoots past me and into my captor. The wood floor is musty against my mouth as I suck in lungfuls of air from the impact, a dull pain radiating out through my ribs, and I feel strong hands gripping my shoulders and pulling me up. Apollo is saying something in a breath of rushed air over my ear before the scene dissolves into a whirlwind of colour, and the last thing I see there is the golden brown halo of Granger in the doorway. Her eyes meet mine for one infinite second before my body rushes away.

**4**

Harry and I are clearing up dinner on the balcony when a young man Apparates into the street below us, and the plate I am holding clatters back to the table, because his hair seems almost red in the dusk. He is frantic, his body turned halfway toward us and halfway toward the doorway to the magical arrondissement, and when he looks up and sees us, his expression steels and he raises his wand. There is one horrible moment where Harry raises his own wand beside me, levelling it toward the man in the street, but I grab his arm and force him to drop it. Almost before I realise what I am doing, I have Apparated down and pulled out my wand, preparing to flash my Auror badge.

“Are you police?” the young man hisses. He has grabbed my arm and is pulling me through the doorway, and I hear the crack in the air behind me as Harry follows. We are rushing into a decrepit hotel, the stale air of the stairwell whipping past me.

We reach the room on the top floor, and it is almost as if he has been waiting there all this time. I am frozen by indecision when I see him. He is bleeding from the mouth, his chin streaked with crimson like the muzzle of a predator after a kill, and his eyes are the dark grey of storm clouds. Behind me, Harry casts a stunning spell toward the figure holding Malfoy up, and the young man rushes toward him, Apparating them away into the empty air.

From the stairs behind us, there rises the thunderous sound of the backup Auror team, and I realise with a sick sort of panic that Malfoy is getting away. I am blind to everything else, thinking suddenly and illogically of the way that Ron used to run his hands through my hair before we fell asleep at night. There is so much wrong with this world that still has to be set right, and I step into the void of their Apparition and watch as Harry’s eyes widen, his hand reaching out toward me. The window of opportunity is closing, and he will not be able to follow me or protect me if I decide to do this. The scent of blood is heavy in the air, and I know I will be able to find them if I leave, but I have to do it now—

The familiar pull tugs painfully from behind my ribs as the room rushes away and the atoms of my body snap back together in a darkened alley. A tavern rises from the middle of the street ahead, the windows and doorways a flurry of activity, and I catch the familiar white blond of Malfoy’s head as he rounds the corner. When I try to follow, my body stings as though I have been burned, and bright blue light blinds me. I throw my arms up and see only grey outlines against the sky before hands press down on my shoulders.

I yell, though no one appears to be listening, and the cobblestones scrape against my knees as I am dragged past their wards. My throat is hoarse from screaming, and one of them stuns me into silence before thin ropes snake around my wrists. My vision returns slowly, patches of blackness obscuring everything other than what lies straight ahead of me, and I realise I am tied to a support post in the back of the tavern. The smell of smoke lies heavy over everything, flooding my head. In the street outside, people are yelling, and the bright colours of spells flash through the darkness.

These are the revolutionaries we have been watching for, I realise, this group of young people waging war in the street outside, though I wonder who they are fighting if the Auror team is back at the hotel. There is no time for hesitation, and my wrists burn as I struggle against the ropes. My wand digs into my spine from where it lies tucked into the back of my shorts, and the heat is stifling as I gasp and thrash against the post. I am useless, useless—unable to protect myself or anyone else, unable to save anyone, unable to fight.

“What are you doing here?” comes a voice from behind me, and I recognise him as the young man from earlier. His hair curls over his ears in the heat, and his eyes are shining with the thrill of battle, but he kneels down beside me and begins to untie the ropes.

“Who are you fighting?” I demand, trying to reach for my wand even though his fingers are still working the knots.

“The same people you once did.”

“No, no—overthrowing your government isn’t the answer,” I say, but he is no longer listening. A flash of light flits across his face as a spell barely misses us, and there, outside the doorway, Malfoy moves across my field of vision, firing spells into the darkness at whoever lies waiting.

“Madeleine told me who you are,” the young man says. Madeleine? I feel dazed and dizzy, and his words are barely filtering through my consciousness. There is so much about war that I have never understood. In a way, I have always been following orders, chasing after phantoms, first for justice and now for revenge. “You must believe me when I tell you that your government is helping the wrong people.”

“Please, just slow down,” I gasp. All my senses are flooding back too quickly, and the delayed shock from the wards is setting in on my bones like the slow coming of winter. The ropes lie undone around my wrists, but I feel too weak to move, and the young man kneels before me, a dark outline against the scene through the doorway. His eyes are bright, an echo of the hope I lost one year ago.

“Everything has gone wrong in this country,” he says, “but now our dark night may end at last.”

From somewhere in the distance, I hear the high whistle of light cutting through the air, and I am reaching out toward the young man in front of me. He is illuminated by a pale flash of blue before he slumps forward, and I am up on my knees, the front of my blouse stained red and wet, his body going limp in my arms. He is trying to speak, but his throat gurgles with blood, spilling from the corner of his mouth. His expression is more confusion than pain or anything else, and I am crying not for him but for everything else I have lost.

A shadow falls over us as Malfoy kneels and pulls his friend against his chest. “Apollo,” he hisses. “Apollo, come on.” He is drenched in blood, his hands shaking, his wand abandoned on the floor beside him, and I am remembering a night one year ago when I was in his place. “Oh, no, please—”

“My name . . .” Apollo says, coughing out the words. His body is seizing and his arms are going slack, but his eyes are lucid and he blinks back a sheen of tears. My hand flutters over my heart, my fingers digging into my skin through the thin fabric of my blouse.

“No, it’s all right. I know, I know,” Malfoy is saying. “My name was never Madeleine. I know, all right? I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . .”

In his arms, Apollo goes still, his eyes staring open and sightless toward the stars overhead through the doorway. There is so much blood, all over us and all over the floor, all over my clothes. The copper smell of it floods my mouth, and I am backing away slowly, my wand raised toward Malfoy, who is still cradling the body in his arms as though he were holding a child.

“There are a lot of things we never knew about each other,” he says then, and I don’t know whether he is talking to Apollo or to me. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, and the faint scar of his Dark Mark is still burnished into the skin of his forearm. Outside, the battle rages on, and I level my wand toward him.

 _“Why?”_ I howl, as though it has been torn out of me. I do not even know what I am asking.

He lays his friend on the floor and rises, and my wand clatters down from between my shaking fingers. In the sporadic light from the doorway, the faint scar of the word _Mudblood_ is emblazoned out across the inside of my arm. I know it was not Malfoy who left this scar, who killed Ron and tore my life apart. I know I have been chasing the wrong thing all this time, because we are both covered in scars, inside and out, and I press my hand to the bottom of my ribs and think about the one person I was never able to save, the one person I hoped to grow old with in a world without all of this.

A flash of white light passes along the side of my face, so close that I can smell the burn of it in the hot air it leaves behind. Malfoy is taking my wrist and pulling me outside through the back door, his grip so tight I think it will leave a bruise. The battle is beginning to subside, and I realise that most of his friends are lying dead on the ground in the street, but it is too late, too late for any of us. Whomever they have been fighting will find us soon. Everything will catch up with us eventually.

“Let me go,” I whimper, my voice reedy and thin, my shoulders shaking, but he does not listen, and I am whirling away through the abandoned streets of Paris, the smell of saltwater rushing through my empty heart.

**5**

I Apparate us to the cliff at the edge of what used to be my property, the same cliff where I fell to my death almost a year ago. She tumbles to the ground before me and lies shaking in the wet grass, a summer storm knifing lightning through the sky overhead. After the rush of battle, the countryside around the manor feels quiet in the same way that a dream is quiet, familiar mouths moving with no sound.

My hands are still stained red with Apollo’s blood, and I pull them through the grass before giving up on it, wringing them together against my chest as though they will hold my lungs in place. This is how everything ends, how everything has always ended for me, here on the edge of a great height. Granger runs the back of her hand across her eyes and looks up at me, her face contorted even though she is no longer crying.

“You’re going to kill me,” she says.

“No,” I tell her. “No, I’m done with all that.”

She pushes herself up to her feet, wavering at the edge. Below her, the water is white and violent against the dark rocks at the base of the cliff. I once hated her for the power she had over me, but perhaps we were both imprisoned by something greater than ourselves. “You . . . I need to arrest you,” she says, her body shaking. Her eyes are wide and her clothes are drenched with blood and rain.

There is so much about this world that I wish to have forgotten, so much that war and prison tore away from me that I can never hope to regain. “Yes,” I say. “Arrest me, Granger. It’s over. Arrest me.”

Her breath escapes her in a long, delirious sigh, as though she has been held underwater, and she slumps forward into my arms. It has been almost ten years since the war ended, ten years of nightmares and aimless wandering, and her body shudders against me the same way I have shuddered every night in my sleep. We stand together at the edge of the cliff, staring into the face of the sea until we feel as though we could fall forever.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2013 Dramione Remix challenge, based on the characters of Valjean and Javert from Les Misérables.


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